First Bucharest Dribbble Meetup – Thoughts & Impressions

On the 5th of September, me and my team at Creative Tim have hosted the first Bucharest Dribbble meetup. Since it was such a fun and interesting experience for us, we thought we should share some thoughts and impressions about the event. It was an overall great evening, filled with lively conversations and nice people in a cool atmosphere.

We wanted to get to know the design community in Bucharest for a few months and we thought the best way was getting together. Since a lot of Romanian designers show their work in Dribbble, we contacted the people there. There were happy to sponsor the event and sent over all sorts of goodies for the participants. We also added some swag of our own, making some stickers to help you Get Shit Done.

Design notebook, Get Shit Done sticker, random Chet Faker song.

Creative Tim poster at the entrance.

We expected somewhere around 20 people and were thrilled to have over 40 participants. Our friends at TechHub Bucharest helped us by providing the space and necessary tools. And we also had some great sponsors: Designmodo, UXeria, HotJar and TrackDuck provided web design tools and RedBull came along with energy drinks.

Photos during the meetup

Participants enjoying drinks and snacks

The girls from Red Bull.

We had some games to begin with. Everyone got to know and talk with someone new. Since it was a Dribbble meetup, we added an analog playoff. What that means is that every participant could draw his collegue in a chance to win a yo-yo. It was great fun and people draw stuff ranging from actual depictions of people to a Swiss army knife.

Icebreakers and getting to know each other.

Analog Playoff Shot

Gallery of shots

We then moved on to the speaches, where we had a variety of topics. The first one was Alex Paduraru from Creative Tim, who talked about our journey: going from work for clients to building a startup. He talked about rewards, but all pitfalls and people were eager to find out more.

Alex Paduraru

Tea Tomescu was our next guest speaker talking about her life a freelancer, building icons and the process of selling them or integrating them inside a project.

Tea Tomescu

Madalin Craciun talked about a subject that proved to be very controversial: Guerilla branding. More exactly, he explained the process that he and his team put together before actually starting to design an application.

Madalin Craciun

And our last guest was Raul Taciu, also known as Graphic Burger. He was kind enough to answer to a series of questions about his startup’s journey and also future plans.

Raul Taciu

Everyone was pretty tired at this point, so we wrapped it out, had a group photo and some cold drinks and head out to the Old City. It was quite a night and we plan to have a lot more of them.